Lisa Robertson – författare

The Men is a work that will be both familiar and fresh to anyone who has read Lisa Robertson. As a poet Robertson has received unrivaled praise for her uncompromising intelligence and style. The Men will not only compliment her previous work, but will add a new layer as a far more personal and lyrical book than anything she has yet published. Who are the men? The Men are a riddle. What do they want? Their troubles become lyric. The Men explores a territory between the poet and a lyric lineage among men. Following a tradition that includes Petrarch's Sonnets, Cavalcanti, Dante's works on the vernacular, Montaigne, and even Kant, Robertson is compelled towards the construction of the textual subjectivity these authors convey—a subjectivity that honours all the ambivalence, doubt, and tenderness of the human. Yet she remains angered by the structure of gender these works advance. It is this troubled texture of identification that she examines in The Men. How does a woman of the present century see herself, in men's lyric texts of the renaissance, in the tradition of the philosophy of the male subject, as well as in the men that surround her, obfuscating, dear, idiotic and gorgeous as they often seem? What if "she" wrote "his" poems? At once intimate and oblique, humorous and heartbreaking, composed and furious, The Men seeks to defamiliarize both who, and what men are.

A New York Times 100 Notable Book and longlisted for the Warwick Writing Prize, Lisa Robertson''s Magenta Soul Whip collects occasional works written over the past fifteen years, turning vestige into architecture, chagrin into resplendence. In them, we recognize our grand, saddened century.

"Robertson proves hard to explain but easy to enjoy. . . . Dauntlessly and resourcefully intellectual, Robertson can also be playful or blunt. . . . She wields language expertly, even beautifully."—The New York Times

What if the cinema of the present were a Möbius strip of language, a montage of statements and questions sutured together and gradually accumulating color? Would the seams afford a new sensibility around the pronoun "you"? Would the precise words of philosophy, fashion, books, architecture, and history animate a new vision, gestural and oblique? Is the kinetic pronoun cinema?

These and other questions are answered in the new collection from acclaimed poet and essayist Lisa Robertson. The dazzling new collection will feature three different back covers (designed by artists Hadley + Maxwell).

A quorum of crows will be your witness.

And if you discover you were bought?

You note the smell of rain, bread, and exhaust mixed with tiredness.

And if you yourself are incompatible with your view of the world?

And what is the subject but a stitching?

Once again you are the one who promotes artifice.

At 2 am on Friday, you burn with a maudlin premonition.

And rankings and rankings and badges and repetitions.

Lisa Robertson''s book Lisa Robertson''s Magenta Soul Whip was named one of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2010 and was longlisted for the 2011 Warwick Prize. Her other books include Debbie: An Epic, The Men, The Weather, and Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. She is the 2014 Bain Swiggett Professor at Princeton University.